experiment

So I just downloaded the Bats for Lashes album I never got around to downloading last year and I also got a Lookbook song I've been fiending on Youtube and all this indie is giving me that weird feeling where I feel like I need to create something amazing to exist in the same world as Natasha Khan and Grant Cutler. It's strange, my best works tend to be tied to the moments in my life where something shakes me on a sensory level. I might see something happen on the street, or I might smell a scent that blooms into a story in my head in a v. Proust-like way, or in this case I receive an auditory jolt so stimulating that it's like my imagination has taken Ritalin and cannot stop wandering. It happened when I first listened to Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton, My Brightest Diamond, and it's happening now.

I remember wandering the University Bookstore one afternoon last year when I hadn't much else to do and I somehow stumbled upon the Belle Lettres section. I remember this one author popped an LSD or two and had written an autobiography of a moment as he lapsed into hysterics. It reminds me of this study conducted by the government with patients on acid and their progressive drawings:



My mind is racing like panel six. What's sad though is that days from now, after this high from this beautiful music has worn off, I will do as panel nine decrees:

"I have nothing to say about this last drawing, it is bad and uninteresting, I want to go home now."

in revue

With the end of the year come and gone, one needs only to Google "blog 2009" to get a year in review from every cyberboy/cybergirl's perspective. This got me thinking as I hopped in the shower (the place I do the majority of my heavy thought).

This year, for the first time, I organized and played intramural basketball. I play a lot of 1-on-1 and more rarely, 2-on-2, but the 5-man game has always been something that's eluded me. I don't really watch too much NBA, mostly because the channels we have consist of a snowy CTV and the TV Guide, so seeing 5 players in action and the plays they run is something I only dream about. Kash and I tried out for our junior high basketball team but we were both accustomed to playing the 1-on-1 game that Kash was cut immediately and I was one of 2 players to be cut in the last day of tryouts. We were working on outlet passes and I didn't understand that there was urgency in a pass to a player upcourt. The coach got frustrated and then tried to teach me a simple pick and roll, but my decision making rolling off the screen was terrible since there is obviously no picking in man-to-man ball.

I was just thinking, as Emily Haine's Reading in Bed played through my head, that I was rather meek this year. I spent a lot of time researching Rip Hamilton's game and watching Chris Paul's assist videos on YouTube, and was working on developing my passing and running games. Focusing on this unfortunately made me forget the most important thing in basketball - you need to score. If all you're doing is eliminating yourself from shooting contention, that's one less player on the floor that's participating on the scoresheets. Don't get me wrong, passing and running is great, but if all you're doing is running to get an open shot then passing it back to a player who isn't open for a shot, there's really no point (pun!).

So in review, out of like the 6 games we played this season, I score exactly 2 points. It was a nice two points at least, from a falling fade on the left side I banked in a gorgeous floater. The rest of my game consisted of bringing the ball up the court - I was deigned one of three guards who had safe enough dribbling skills to bring it up without turning it over - and making assists. I hardly ever touched the ball after taking it up off the inbounds; rather, I looked like a chicken with its head cut off running around on the court getting open for a shot that would ultimately never come.

After games we would play some pick up ball just to kill time - we were all there so why not? We'd play some 2-on-2 and I'd make my fair share of shots and then the other players would ask me, "Why don't you shoot like that in game?" I remember attending a church pick up game - English congregations vs. Cantos - and this one guard Jeremiah that had played on the Team Alberta squad sternly told me, "When you're open like that, take the shot! What was that pass for?"

I guess I had done so much studying of the parts of the games that I thought I was weak at that I forgot that point guards also shoot the basketball when they're open. I have lots to work on this year.

crisis

I woke up this morning and the existentialist alter ego of mine took over as the main identity in my palette of mixed personalities. I put on my headphones and listened to a variety of thought inducing tracks while I stared out the window: Taylor Swift - Fifteen, Emily Haines - Reading in Bed, My Brightest Diamond - Golden Star, Kanye West - I Wonder, Kings of Leon - Manhattan; soundtrack of my life. I've finally achieved that state of nirvana when doing this, almost akin to when I was staring at the ocean off the coast of Peggy's Cove in Halifax. I'm able to see my thoughts stirring in a pot before me and better control how they appear to me - it's easier to understand yourself when you're omnipotent over your mind.

One thing I noticed lingering over all my thoughts was a cumulus stratus of unease. I zoomed real close to it like you would zoom in on your digital camera, and I found that this was the air of disappointment. Earl, my dissociative existentialist state (I just dubbed him that), realized that this portion of my mind is the choking smog that constantly swirls around me, hovering like the cloud of pollution above industrial countries. It is this air that continuously tells me I will never be enough, I will never be satisfied, I will always sell myself short.

So I pan out and observe my life through the lens of Earl's -5.75 and -5.25 degree glasses, and I see clearly. No ring, no surgical prowess, no semblance of artistic talent, no published works, no subscriptions to Nature Neuroscience, no understanding of social interactions and being part of social constructs, a lousy Scrabble score, an empty bank account, and a person that has never traveled anywhere he's wanted to go in his life. If I was Earl all the time, I'd kill myself.

God, if we are to be humbled, I am humbled so. I understand what it means to be at the nidus of this web of excellence yet be at the nadir of the ziggurat of achievement simultaneously, so please, I beg you, take me by the hand and show me where to go.